Pink
by dontstealmyvitaminies
Summary: He left her in the morning with nought but flushing stains of pink-and-peony on her ivory skin, far too many empty spaces, an 'I love you' that in restrospect, broke her heart, and memories of poetic reassurance from someone who was no longer there.


She was pink.

Pink, in a varying range of shades and hues, beginning with the softest peony that flushed in her perfectly sculpted cheeks, ending in the lurid bubble-gum-fairy-floss-highlighter-pink locks that hung with the most elegant ease over her perfect neck.

It was a disgusting shade of pink, a nauseating colour that gave him a headache if he stared at it too long. He disliked it immensely, but he could hardly imagine a life without it.

Remus' eyes traced the curve of her slender ivory throat to the slight dip of her suprasternal notch. Great men had written books filled with poetry dedicated to that throat. It had been explored with precision and a thoroughness that he usually dedicated only to the most difficult of tasks – fingers had traced, tongues had tasted and lips had suckled, leaving a flushing patch of pomegranate-coloured skin that was so impossibly beautiful it made _him_ want to dedicate a book of poetry to it.

He wanted to use thousands upon thousands of well-placed words to contemplate how utterly gorgeous it was that her pink and ivory body was stained with a manifestation of his feelings, his passions, his actions, that there would be a reminder of _what they did_ when the chaotically scrambling hands, tracing fingers, tasting tongues and suckling lips had removed themselves from her perfectly pure skin.

His eyes moved upwards to contemplate the line of her jaw, and the rise of her cheekbones. Colourless eyes were shut, ebony lashes set against the dusty-pink of her lids. He passed one hand gentle over that lid, before pushing a strand of bubble-gum hair from across her brow to settle against its fellows in her perfect mane of glossy waves.

"'_Her little lips, more made to kiss, than to cry bitterly for pain…_'" he murmured ever so softly, in a voice that had been wearied by the years. He traced the shape of her full rose-pink lips with the tips of his trembling fingers, feeling much the rebellious teen with unearned power as he vandalised the purest monument in the world.

She was his snowy lamb being led to the slaughter, his blushing virgin sacrifice, his little piece of perfection that he was slowly tainting with his very presence. Her skin felt impossibly smooth against his weathered hands, and he could almost see the stain of his touch blooming just beneath the delicately translucent surface.

"'_Her neck is like white melitote, flushing for the pleasure of the sun_, _the throbbing of the linnet's throat, is not so sweet to look upon_," he practically whispered as he returned to her throat with intense curiosity. He wanted… he wanted…

He wanted to take her apart. He wanted to take each little piece of her pink-and-ivory-puzzle body and spend a lifetime contemplating it. He wanted to peer inside and document _how_ she existed – how it was possible that one creature should be so very…

_Pink_.

Horribly, beautifully, tempestuously and elegantly _pink_.

And horribly, beautifully, tempestuously and elegantly not _his_.

"I think I'll write a book of you," he informed her factually. Ebony lashed fluttered upwards, colourless eyes focusing on his form.

"W – What?" she murmured hazily, attempting to sit up. One firm hand against a slender shoulder ceased her actions. She shifted slightly, the bones beneath his hands rolling and sliding back. For a moment he feared that her pretty bones would break the surface of that ivory skin with a faint _popping_ sound, like a cork pulled from a long-necked bottle of sparkling Rosé.

"I will write a book of you… One chapter for each shade of pink I find on your body," he continued, adjusting his position to one of plain indecency, his chin resting on her piano-key rib cage where her fluttering-throbbing-throated linnet of a heart beat like a trapped bird. Her face was slightly disfigured by the curve of one hopelessly perfect breast, but it mattered not – it provided him with a clear view of the dip of her throat as he lazily ran his fingers across it. "And I won't let anyone read it. I refuse to share it," he added with slight pointedness. He felt, rather than saw her smile.

"That's fine, I doubt anyone would be interested in reading it anyway," she laughed.

Her laughter was like a tinkling, silver-handled bell.

It was a _pink_ laugh.

"_O twining hands, O delicate white body made for love and pain_…" he murmured.

"What is that?"

"Wilde."

"Who?" she questioned, wrinkling her perfect little nose, the slightest of creases marring her perfect brow.

"He's a Muggle writer. Very famous," he replied dismissively.

"Oh… should I know him?" she asked hesitatingly, her brow curved slightly with anxiousness. He chuckled.

"For what purpose exactly? For general knowledge?" he retorted with a teasing laugh. Her cheeks flushed a gentle crimson, and she gently bit against the bottom of her lip.

"Umm… well… would you like me to read his stuff?"

"I don't you if you would be particularly interested," he said simply, running his hand along the side of her waist. He began gently kissing a patch of perfectly perfect ivory skin just above her hip bone, suckling softly to stain her skin pink once more.

"No! I – I mean, if you like him then maybe…"

"You can read Wilde if you would truly like, Nymphadora, I shall hardly attempt to stop you," he assured her with a small chuckle. The hue of her cheeks deepened, and the sides of her almond-shaped, colourless eyes fell slightly.

"So this is how it's going to be," she murmured very, very softly. Remus had to strain to hear, and even then, he felt quite certain his ears deceived him.

"Pardon?"

"These are the parts we're going to play. You're the Professor and I'm just… well I'm just the dumb hanger-on that you patronise," she stated, not even having the decency (or mercy, perhaps?) to hide the hurt from her voice. Remus sighed, and sat up, the off-white sheets pooling around his waist. He ran a wearied, calloused hand through his greying hair.

"I'm not trying to be patronising, Nymphadora, I simply don't think that you will like Oscar Wilde. He had a miserable life, he was a horrible man and there's not a single smile in any of his works," he said shortly, turning to gage her expression.

With eyes lowered, hands folded tightly in the scrunched pool of sheets, and her ivory body stained with pale orchard blooms (he wanted to call those marks of love something beautiful, romantic and tragic, but they simply reminded him of a painful rash or burn. Perhaps that was all the more fitting), she was his trembling sacrifice, his meek pre-Raphaelite beauty, his tiny porcelain doll or pathetically vulnerable babe – but she was _his_, and he felt the urge to comfort her as best he could, with his old, weathered hands.

There was something tragic about her. She was a contradiction in terms, a walking paradox, the broken doll that never wished to draw attention to her cracks, but at the same time, the wild, outlandish pup that would clumsily yap at your heels in an attempt to secure your notice.

He had, sometimes, upon those first beginning days of his acquaintance with her, found her to be pathetic. But he never said so.

She was a tornado. She was the cataclysmic act of God that had ripped through his life and turned it upside down – he wanted to give her a title and a place that would always remain by his side, but in his deepest heart of hearts he _knew_.

He knew that she didn't belong by his side, in his bed, beneath his body as his insistent lips caused blushes of pink-stained skin.

Whereas _he_ was the blazing, burning meteorite. Maybe he could be called something beautiful, but mostly, _mostly_, when he burned out he would take her with him.

"Well perhaps it's something I'd rather decide myself. Maybe I _will_ read Oscar Wilde, and maybe I _will_ like him," she retorted simply. He sighed against the gently incline of her stomach, fingers tracing over the slightly-jutting hipbone, running over the stains of his causing.

Soft, tender bruises the shape of his palm and slender fingers on her side as he clutched onto her, the sound of his breath hitching against the shell of her ear.

Flushing patches of peony and pomegranate covering her neck, shoulders, the valley between her breasts – all from where his insistent lips had suckled while her back arched upwards with the burning sensation.

Small, slow-to-heal grazes from where his fingernails had dug into the side of her hip as he rocked against and gripped to her tightly, her gasp and his moan swallowed by an all consuming kiss.

"Don't..." he sighed, before beginning again. "Don't think you must train yourself to my tastes. You can read Wilde if you wish, but I just don't think –"

"Poetry can come in many different forms, Remus," she muttered quietly, her colourless eyes turned from him. Almost bitterly she spoke again. "_'I know that things are broken, and though there's too many things unsaid, you say that you have spoken, and like the coward I am, I hang my head_'," she recited with such quiet he could barely believe she spoke.

"I didn't know you read poetry," he commented thoughtfully, attempting to meet her eyes. She gently bit against her perfectly pouted crimson mouth.

"It's _The_ _Weird Sisters_, Remus," she informed him shortly. He wanted to chuckle, but he couldn't find a single ounce of amusement within him. He turned instead to drawing constellations between the markings on her body. With a name like Nymphadora, how could she be anything but a constellation? "'_And you lay careless your head on my chest, don't even look at me looking my best, and all of these things I can't describe, you'd rather I didn't try_," she choked out, curling into a tight ball, away from him.

He slid up the bed, and pressed his chest against her spine, lips suckling at the back of her neck. Almost immediately the ivory skin began to flush a gentle peach shade. In a few moments it would be as red as a robin's breast. His hands gently slid over her side, across her hips and up her stomach. She traced tiny letters against them with her slender finger. If he concentrated with the upmost intensity (but when did he _not_?) he could understand her words.

'_They told me love was a fortress,  
And I had never put it to the test  
And all the while I relied on this honesty,  
Well in love, we are but amateurs at best..._'

He sighed against the now rose-coloured marking.

"You should always know that..." he began, frowning slightly as the worlds were born in his mouth. He spoke with hesitation, honesty and intensity – as if his speech was something that would ooze and stain and spoil. "That there will always be times when I... when I wish things were different," he murmured.

He felt her tense against him, but he held her tight against his chest.

"But no matter the circumstances, when I imagine my life differently, the change is to me. I would never... I don't imagine you any different to who you are, Nymphadora," he continued quietly. He leant his forehead against the smooth, pure but not unexplored plane between her jutting shoulder blades. "I always wish I were different. But I've never wished for you to change," he finished quietly.

"You're leaving today. Aren't you."

It wasn't a question, it hung heavy and unchallenged and vulnerable. Her voice was weak and loaded with tears, it was as if it were torn from her white throat, demanded to cure the silence that lingered between them.

"Yes."

"Don't."

He sighed, and screwed his eyes shut, releasing a long, slow breath that threatened to consume him. He held tight to her, her small, lithe white hands covering his, he knew she would bruise and mark and wince slightly when his hands passed over her once more, but he didn't care.

"Don't ask me not to, Nymphadora, because you know I won't go if you ask," he pleaded. "Dumbledore needs me. The order needs me."

"_I _need you," she managed to gasp out as he spun her on her side and pulled her beneath him. He pressed his forehead against hers. Her eyes were wide, pleading, desperate and tragically devoid of any colour. They trembled as he held her.

"You shouldn't," he insisted with slight sternness.

"But I do."

For the second time that evening, he wanted to chuckle, but he simply couldn't.

"I could live without you, Nymphadora," he began quietly. "I could breathe without you, I could wake up and eat and sleep and waste my days without you," he confessed. She swallowed rather obviously, her ivory throat rising and falling in a sharp but somehow gentle incline. "But I don't _want_ to. And I know I'll never... I won't ever be happy again. Or even content. So there's the truth of it," he muttered.

"I don't want the truth. I don't want what could be your last words to me to be truth," she cried quietly, silvery tears slipping over the faded bisque of her cheeks. They caught in her dark lashes and they clung together like some tragically wounded animal.

"These aren't my last words. And – if, Nymphadora, my last words on this earth are not 'I love you', then you just didn't hear my say them."

She lowered those colourless eyes, but the tears did not cease to fall. He didn't expect them to – in fact, he might be insulted if they had.

His hand gently ran from her cheek, across her jaw, down her neck and rested against her shoulder. He bowed his head and pressed a soft kiss to the patch of skin that hid her beating heart.

He wanted to pretend that what he had said was the truth of it. That he really could live without her. But it would be a sad thing to hand the truth to a woman who bore none of it within her own body.

Because she wasn't, despite every patch of ivory-and-peony skin on that perfect body, despite each fairy-floss strand of hair, and despite every flushing stain from his lips, pink. Pink was bold, cheerful and bright, whereas she was weak, tragic and burning.

"We still have a little time. I don't have to leave till this evening," he murmured against the shell of her ear. She nodded. "'_My limbs are wasted with a flame. My feet are sore from travelling. For calling on my Lady's name, my lips have now forgot to sing_,'" he muttered against her neck.

It wasn't until his greying coat was tossed over his robes and his feet were carrying him to the door that she responded.

"'_And as you lean in for your last kiss, who in the world could ask me to resist? Your hands are cold as they find my neck, and this love that I've found, I detest_.'"

He gave a weak smile as he slid his arms down from around her slender ivory neck.

"Aren't we the poets," he murmured with a slight, forced laugh. She buried her head in his neck and breathed in his scent. He had sometimes thought her pathetic. But no longer.

"Or liars," she offered simply.

"Or lovers," he corrected, running a hand through those soft, lurid bubble-gum-fairy-floss-highlighter-pink locks that hung with that enviable, most elegant ease over her that perfect neck. "Don't let the marks fade away," he begged quietly.

"I won't if you don't," she returned with a clumsy smile on her full crimson lips. Her pearly teeth bit against it, blood rushing beneath the point of impact, as if they would burst.

"Do I need to say it?"

"Always."

"I love you."

"I love you too."

"Be safe."

"Be safer."

He gave another clumsy smile, and passed his own, weathered lips over hers. He pulled away before it could burn him much longer. He nodded without another word, and turned to the door.

He found himself wondering how something so cataclysmically life-destroying as the steps he took away from her could be so utterly simple. Then he turned, and saw her standing in the doorway with pleading, colourless eyes, bruised, well-kissed crimson lips, and slowly fading pink hair.

"Your last words weren't 'I love you'," she reminded him helplessly.

With a crooked smile, he dug his hands into his pockets.

"No. They weren't," he said simply, before turning back, and apperating away without another word.

It was some months before he saw her again, with no longer a single drop of pink to her at all. It was good; he thought to himself, that she had stopped lying in his absence.

"I read Oscar Wilde," she began helplessly, lowering those colourless eyes while he stood on her doorstep, echoing carols reverberating around the pathetically festive halls of her apartment building.

"And?"

Those eyes rose to meet him, brows slightly lowered around the edges, tears trembling and threatening to escape over her colourless cheeks.

"Why does it always have to be something tragic?" she questioned desperately.

"Because. I'd never read anything that wasn't," he shrugged simply. His words seemed to strike her, but she simply nodded.

So he stepped across the threshold and took her in his arms, determined to create as many flushing stains of pomegranate-pink on her ivory skin as possible before he had to leave again.

He wanted to think, as they lay entangled in sheets and limbs later that night, that he was the pink to her ivory, that he brought about the crimson blush and the peony spoils.

But the simple fact was that he wasn't.

So he left her in the morning, with nothing but regretful blue eyes, a cold-handed kiss, and a quiet '_I love you_' that in retrospect, broke her heart. Her beating, loving, tragically, cataclysmically, tempestuously, blazingly pink heart. And when that burnt out, what would she have left?

The old stains of pink against ivory, the still-tender bruises of his exploring hands, an empty place in her bed and between her slender, spindly white fingers, and memories of poetic reassurance from someone that wasn't coming back.

**A/N: Remus' poem is by Oscar Wilde, called '**_**La Bella Donna Del Mia Mente**_**', and Tonks' song is called 'Liar' by Mumford & Sons. Companion piece to my previous one-shot 'Blue'. Not as good, I think, but regardless, I like it enough. **


End file.
